Why I'm building Ora DJ

I've always loved music: how it moves people, how it evolves, how a great DJ can read a room and take a crowd somewhere. So when I went to put a set together, I assumed the software would be the easy part. It wasn't.

Rekordbox got in the way of nearly everything. Importing tracks and organizing them means hunting for tiny buttons buried in random submenus. Finding a track I know I own takes too long. Beatgrids I fix by hand. The music was the fun part; everything around it was friction.

But I build software for a living. I've spent the last ten years as a product manager at fast-growing tech companies, working on consumer apps, dense technical tools, and data and machine-learning products, leading a variety of teams along the way. So it always puzzled me how a tool this popular could get away with workflows this clumsy. The problem isn't that it lacks features. It's that the basics were probably fine twenty years ago and have barely moved since. The rest of the software world learned how to make tools feel good to use. Rekordbox sat it out. Half the DJ world puts up with this. I couldn't accept that there wasn't a better way.

Preparing a set is a creative act. You're shaping an arc: finding the record that answers the last one, remembering why you saved that strange edit eight months ago, building tension you'll break later in the room. Good software should make that feel like play. Most DJ software makes it feel like data entry.

That gap is the whole reason Ora DJ exists.

It imports your existing library, from Rekordbox, Traktor, Serato, or wherever it lives now, so none of your history gets left behind. It makes the chores quick: tagging, cleaning up metadata, getting beatgrids and cue points right without a fight. It gives you a canvas: lay a set out by hand, arrange tracks by energy, leave a gap where you're still missing the right bridge. You see how a night could move instead of scrolling one long list. And it helps you rediscover your own collection, the tracks that sink to the bottom of a big library and never come back up.

The ambition is to handle the whole of preparation, end to end, well enough that Rekordbox becomes the last step instead of the place you suffer: do the work in Ora DJ, then export to it for the USB and the CDJs. Getting there means production-grade audio, effects, and controller support, so you can rehearse a set for real rather than approximate it. That's the hard part. It's also the point.

It's in open beta, and free while I build it out. Some of it is still rough, and I'd rather ship it and fix it in the open than polish in private. I'm posting the technical and product problems as I go.

If your DJ software has ever made you sigh, try it, and tell me where it falls short. That's the fastest way it becomes the tool we all wish existed.

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